Politic, History and Language in bilingual writing between Chinese and English

    The Clash of Empires brings to light the cultural legacy of sovereign thinking that emerged in the course of the violent meetings between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty. In “The Birth of a Super-sign”, Lydia Liu demonstrates how the collision of imperial will and competing interests, rather than the civilizational attributes of existing nations and cultures, led to the change of the word Yi. In turn, one can say, the author thinks that this kind of translation of concept and thought is not just a linguistics or literature issue, even not a issue of “cultural translation” by the definition of anthropologists, but involves politics, economy, history and so on. Against Huntington's “cultural conflict” theory, she points out “Civilizations do not clash, but empires do”(Liu, 2).
    The rhetoric of barbarity and civilization was a central part of British imperial warfare. “The battle of words and translations in the official archives turned out to be central, not peripheral, to the sovereign will that had driven the Opium Wars. ”(Liu, 2)
It is quite an interesting story presented in the chapter, which is about the 51th term in the Tianjin Treaty signed in 1858. Why did it especially forbid the use of Chinese characters "yi"? What are the word history of “yi” and the meaning of birth of the super-sign "yi/barbarian" that caused the disputes between British and Chinese? From the perspective of language, Liu He pointed out that the elimination of the original meaning of "yi" is caused by the colonial politics discourse. As far as I know, the communication between civilization happened in Chinese history in many times, for example, Buddhist scriptures had influenced Chinese very much in history, which didn’t cause disputes and collision as between Britain and China in 19th century. Liu He tried to point out that there is not an abstract, rational, equal exchange of cultural. The ancient Chinese and ancient Indian civilization may be relatively quite equal two cultural community, however, the modern China and modern western are unequal. The particularity of modern Chinese language after the vernacular Chinese took hold is the inequality between subjects. That kind of imaginary equal relation between two languages soundlessly concealed the cultural differences, the political struggle and conflict of interest of different languages.
The language inequality is most fundamental, in my opinion is more important than the inequality in empire politics. Inter-lingual communication is not as Said said such a good trip; it was more like a war. Words are the battlefield between subjects. The relationship of "civilized men-barbarians" in English was transferred to Chinese word "yi". The transfer process is covered by the seemingly transparent, equivalent action of translation.
 The contribution of this book is that the subversion the seemingly equivalence of language symbols and the revealing of the hidden political, culture factors in words and words system. "Super-sign" is fundamental in the construction of "sovereignty consciousness". Therefore, she furthered the problem to "honor" and "injury consciousness". The British Empire was using the super-sign "yi/i/barbarian" to eliminate inner "injury and insult" to achieve their sovereignty imagination. To make "injury consciousness" into "injury discourse" constructed for colonial purpose of the westerners became a righteous diplomatic rhetoric. That is to say, the empire political discourse was at the same time legitimizing itself, and the process of discourse construction is entirely the embodiment of the empire consciousness built on the super-sign.
What is a super-sign? This is the core concept of the book, referring to not individual word itself, but between the meaning chains produced in heterogeneous culture across two or more language semantic fields, which in turn affect the meaning of the identifiable word. It plays a role of metonymic relations between languages. It entices or forces or instructs existing symbols to transplant and spread through different language boundaries.
This kind of super-sign generates in between the exchange of languages and cultures. Its transgression is not only used by empire political discourse, but also in today become a basic problem of language for the bilingual writers. They are accused of betrayal. From the perspective of language as the basic issue, could the danger of producing more super-signs in bilingual writing be a reason? "Yi" as a super-sign lost its original meaning in the operation of colonial ideology. This kind of legal provisions of course won’t happen in modern literature writing. But the conflict in bilingual writing could probably have something to do with this danger in a broader cultural and political context.
Modern bilingual writers is actually using their freedom of writing or translating (here translation is not translation of original meaning, because not completely true and accurate translation of the original is actually creation) the Chinese story or Chinese language that is branded with Chinese cultural background into English, to put Chinese under threat of becoming a super-sign. Once the word becomes a super-sign, they can be easily misread considering that reading is a political action, which in turn aggravate the diasporic nature of the super-sign or even eliminate the original meaning. There are two kinds of misreading, one is using defamiliarization in the context of a second language to gain extra meaning, the other is through the reading selection by the self-centered cultural and political preference to ignore the achievement of the literature as basically a language art.
    Lydia Liu in another book Inter-lingual practice has pointed out that translation is not between equivalent words, but rhetoric of equivalence created in the borderland between the subject language and the object language. This kind of unequal relationship is fundamentally language, but also is political in the colonial modern context.
So for the bilingual writers with the native language as Chinese (different from native American Chinese writer), how to face the charge of "betrayal" in the political and historical circumstances? Bilingual loyalty is also brought out in this context. We can't ignore the political factors in this discourse. Jing Tzu in “Bilingual Loyalty” analyzed three bilingual writers with native Chinese background, all have made an great effort in Chinese and western cultural exchange, especially introducing China to the west. They use different methods, some is successful some failed. They are evaluated differently, and evaluation in this context is across language, is the interaction between the Chinese world and the English world.
    The diasporic nature of bilingual writing endowed freedom as well as predicament to the writers.” The bilingual person is always implicated where he does not presently belong, leaving a residual doubling elsewhere.”(Tzu, 89)
    Among the three, Lin Yutang is successful during the period around May Fourth and Vernacular Movement, and Eileen Chang and Ha Jin are writing after the official legitimacy of vernacular take hold. Lin tried to mediate between Chinese and English as well their cultures. “It is, in other words, unclear when the bilingual writer speaks the truth, because even his betrayal is not exclusive to either language. Making use of the modality of complicity at his disposal, Lin stages a series of confessions that, in fact, turn guilt itself into an intimate, flexible form of loyalty.”(Tzu, 88)
    Eileen Chang struggled between betrayal and loyalty in language and content, which also became the basic reason for her repeated writing of the self. “A perusal of Chang’s posthumous writings tells us that she rewrote as much as she self- translated. The two modes were one and the same.”(Tzu, 98) The linguistic dilemma Chang confronted in translating her novel Yuuannü revokes the weary clinch that “something is lost in translation.”
Ha Jin is more controversial. His English writing’s success in English world causes us to think the relation between language, literature and political problems. Zhu Tianwen’s criticisms in Shaman Words are mostly based on the language and writing itself. She pointed out tat the word-for-word translation of Chinese idioms may work well in English but only become worthless in Chinese. “Disgusted by the exaggerated praise, the protagonist jeers at the Anglophone writer’s purported innovation of a “Chinese-inflected style of English” as a gimmick of translation, the novel effect of which disappears once translated back into Chinese.”(Tzu, 104) Without comparing it to the source language, a translation can prosper in many languages without ever having to prove its credentials in the original.
    In addition Zhu thinks Ha Jin's English novels lost its laudable traits on English language when translated into Chinese. His subject matters are obsolete, like popular-science books. This is from a Taiwanese perspective. Judging by the mainland discourse, they show certain political significance. She even couldn't help comparing the Ha Jin's book with those books like The Joy Luck Club that she thinks to be catering to westerners’ needs of seeking novelty. In addition she also questioned Ha Jin’s confession of being solitary as a writer like himself. She thinks real writing should not cater to the market. Those who don’t write for publication but only by the urge of communicating with the self are the real solitary. She cited Gao Xingjian who only write in Chinese as an example. From her perspective, a writer with Chinese as native language writing in English is a betrayal himself. Writing is a self-translation into language. Those writers have a Chinese self because their language background and life experience, so they are basically writing Chinese stories. Ignoring Ha Jin’s excuse of making a living, could we say writing Chinese story in English is a brave attempt?
    What about Eileen Chang? She also expected the success of her book by the definition of publication and readers, but she seems to have some principles, which seems to be untenable in bilingual writing. Why is it? These untenable principles have something to do with colonial politics as well. Perhaps it is for this reason that Ha Jin emphasizes individual talent against spiritual collective opposition. Maybe in this sense solitary to him can be established. Ha Jin’s English writing is a bold venture, placing himself and his native language under threat and not possible to go back. There is a strong political discourse behind this threat. Thus the adventure is a betrayal, and what's more, Ha Jin’s choice of content has a strong political implication. But does this mean there is no possibility of equal communication?
Ha Jin's success is controversial. When a writer writes like this to get interests for himself, this betrayal is not only in the general issue of language and politics, but also relates to the problem of personal character. Ha Jin's English is still with heavy "Chinese English" (Chinglish) traces, but Eileen Chang has the same problem. This proves that Ha jin did not get the western readers favour by his proficiency on English. The question is: is it purposive or a result of language deficiency? Ha Jin admitted the difficulties in writing in a second language but also said he kept Chinese original meaning intentionally. He also showed his regrets on writing in a second language in many occasions. Is this regret about language itself or cultural and political? Also, is betrayal mutual? Ha jin is against the attribution of betrayal by asserting a country’s betrayal of its writer rather than the writer’s betrayal of his native language. (Tzu, 106) I think this discourse is flawed by the leaving out of the existing influence of colonial discourse, especially on its effect on the Chinese Language.
At the time Lin Yutang’s bilingual writing, China was still in the debate of how to achieve modernization, although under the semi-colonial influence, China's cultural confidence still maintained by the preservation of history. But after the Vernacular Movement, the confidence completely lost because it lost the basic carrier: the language. When British settlers protested the using of “yi”, we were responding in such a confident manner. That's because we still have our own language. After the movement, Chinese was europeanized, the culture of China lost root and foundation, was left with a fracture from history. Lin Shu didn’t care if his translation of La Dame aux Camelias was completely faithful to the English version and dared to express freely with classical Chinese. But to Eileen Chang and Ha Jin, their writing in modern Chinese writing becomes a problem itself. What’s the relation between Europeanized modern Chinese and English? Eileen Chang’s language experiment is actually a departure from the established rules of modern Chinese. But modernization is irreversible, she is actually testing the uniqueness of Chinese language based on ideographic function of Chinese characters by writing in English, and this kind of test must be fulfilled in writing Chinese content. Writing with Europeanized modern Chinese about western subject will only strengthen the Europeanized language, will never succeed in exploring the uniqueness of Chinese.
And the defamiliarization effect Ha Jin’s word-for-word translation from Chinese to English can also be seen as a similar experiment. It is as well questioning the effectiveness of western grammar’s assimilation of Chinese grammar. This just proves Chinese’s fundamental uniqueness and the disadvantages of Europeanization of it. Ha Jin's language ability is inferior to Eileen Chang’s, but his English writing at least is effective, which reveals the relationship between the two languages. If he paraphrase instead of translate word-for-word Chinese idioms that represent the uniqueness of Chinese, it will cover essential defects of Europeanized Chinese.
References:
Lydia He Liu, The clash of empires: the invention of China in modern world making. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Jing Tzu, Sound and script in Chinese diaspora. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010.